Windows 7 goes RTM - but when can you get it?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, operating systems, Beta, Futures, Microsoft on
Microsoft announced RTM today (Wednesday 22nd), but that doesn’t mean you can get the code right now. Depending on how you get Windows, you’ll see it anytime from August to October. Courtesy of the Windows Team blog, here are the dates. All dates are for the initial English version; other languages will follow by the end of October at the latest.
When Who
Right now Gullible downloaders risking malware to get a leaked version on Russian sites that appears to have significant problems.
now to 2 days after RTM PC manufacturers
’shortly’ after RTM IT pros who want the evaluation version from Springboard
August 6th software and hardware developers who use Microsoft Connect and MSDN
TechNet and MSDN subscribers
August 7th Volume Licence customers with SA
August 16th Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members who use the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Portal
August 23rd Microsoft Action Pack Subscribers
September 1st Volume licence customers without SA
October 22nd Consumers buying a boxed copy or a new PC
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Mozilla CEO says it’s too soon for the next Google
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Futures, Microsoft on
No-one has made a business out of Web 2.0 - not in the traditional sense of business success, the IPO. Nearly $30 billion has gone into Web 2.0 startups since 2001; why haven’t we seen a business success there? Mozilla CEO John Lilly thinks we’re looking for the wrong things and asking the wrong questions about what it means for a business to succeed today.
“I would say this is one of the questions of our time,” he told us; “like what does it mean to have a career, what does it mean to do meaningful work?” He’d count Mozilla as a success; they might be fish out of water” at big-name events like Google IO and All Things Digital (where he says “we were the only non profit that went up on stage”) but that’s not the important thing. “For Mozilla, we made the decisions be a public benefit because we thought the Web was too important to leave just to purely commercial interests. We created what’s effectively a hybrid company; we compete in the market but we have this non profit mission and I think we’re pretty successful by any measure other than our revenues. ”
Mozilla Labs is probably unique; Lilly doesn’t expect exactly the same model to work for any other company, but there are plenty of opportunities, even in this financial climate. “I believe there will be more companies that start on less money and require less cash flow to be successful. I believe you’ll see those. Craigslist is one of them.” Anyone else? Yes, he says. “OpenTable went up and did IPO. Craigslist is a going concern; they’re dominant and being incredibly influential. Facebook is minting money. In China you’ve got Tencent QQ. You’ve got any number of companies that have changed the world and are making reasonable cash flow.”
But what about the big success that all the venture capitalists were hoping for, with those $30 billion. That’s a coded question, he says, and what thinks it really means is “Will we see another Google or Microsoft? Well, we hadn’t seen another Microsoft till we saw Google. Microsoft emerged and got giant in the mid 80s; Google emerged and got giant in the mid 2000s. Before that, I’m not sure what you look at before Microsoft, maybe Data General or maybe DEC but it’s probably in the 60s or the 50s. These are once-a-generation companies. Asking ‘where the hell is the next Google, why hasn’t it shown up yet?’, I think, is premature.”
-Mary
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Would Vodafone want T-Mobile for backhaul?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, smartphone, Telecoms, Futures, Networking, Internet, Wireless, Mobile on
It’s probably about buying market share and reducing the competition that drives down prices, but there’s a new problem for mobile operators to think about these days - bandwidth and backhaul.
No matter how fast the 3G chipset in your mobile phone, you’re not getting on the Internet at that speed; you might have 3, 7 or 14Mbps between your phone and the base station but that base station is connected into the net at the same DSL speed as your home broadband. And you’re sharing that with everyone else connected to that base station; say the 50 people in the same mile radius on the same network. Wimax and LTE promise speeds of 80-100Mbps; that means backhaul will have to get much faster and wider - according to a recent In-Stat report, backhaul capacity has to triple by 2013 to a worldwide total of 90,000Gbps to match demand. To get faster speeds needs faster physical connections; faster DSL, expensive fibre optic cable or laser links. And that costs money…
Vodafone and T-Mobile both use BT for backhaul. Last year Vodafone started rolling out Tellabs’s Ethernet-based backhaul to replace the legacy voice network it was previously built on top of (getting an IP network for next-generation services at the same time);or rather BT is doing it for them (it’s all part of the ’21st Century Network’). O2 is taking the same service, and T-Mobile had signed up for it a year before that. Currently the system promises to deliver up to 60Mbps (a big improvement on the 2Mbps at most base stations). If T-Mobile is further along with the rollout, buying them could give Vodafone better bandwidth faster - and in the long run that could be worth as much as buying market share.
T-Mobile users might want to cross their fingers that the deal goes through (which is far from certain). Coverage and the weather and device configuration and the number of other people around and whole bunch of other variables make it hard to compare networks precisely, but of all the networks I test phones with Vodafone consistently gives me the best connection and coverage.
-Mary
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Web 2.0; where did all the money go?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Business, Futures, Developer, Internet on
Is it really just a buzzword? Since 2001, the venture capitalists who fund start-up businesses have invested $29 billion in Web 2.0 companies, but there hasn’t been a single company in the sector that’s been successful enough to have an IPO and become a rich, successful company (and pay back the VC investors). Even if you want to push the definition of Web 2.0 to include Skype, they got their investment in 1998.
In fact, talking at the Future in Review conference this week, Seattle VC Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners says only 15% of venture funds have made money since 2001. “VC as we know it is over”, says Jeb Terry of Aberdeen Investment Management and the US has some hard lessons to learn. Engineers and developers who used to train in the US and start companies in the US now go back to China or Japan and set up there. US companies and products aren’t always setting the standards for the rest of the world either, he says; “The idea that if you won here you could be successful elsewhere is no longer true. You have to think about the rest of the world.”
For Australian companies, the US used to be 65% of the global market; Roger Buckeridge of Australian VC Allen & Buckeridge says it’s down to 30-40%. And start-ups in other countries get more support - from government or other programmes - than new US companies. “Everyone is trying to solve the same problems all around the world and in other countries they’re helping far more than we are helping,” says Michael Pfeffer of Kolohala Ventures in Hawaii. “How much time does a start-up spend fund raising? Five, six months out of the year? If there’s some guy in Israel working on the same problem and all he’s doing is building value in his company, you’re at a disadvantage. We all have to think globally now.”
If investors don’t get a return from start-ups, they’ll stop putting money in and we’ll stop seeing new companies and new products. The venture capital business has made so much money it’s not going to stop overnight, but it is going to change. The VCs are going to be more involved in fewer companies, for a longer time. Expect more tools to come from start-ups in countries other than the US as well.
-Mary
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BlackBerry and the lizard brain
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in smartphone, Telecoms, Enterprise, Futures, Email, Wireless, Mobile on
What’s the difference between me walking down the hall, head down and totally absorbed in reading email on my BlackBerry because I didn’t stop to do it before I left the hotel room (well, the coffee is downstairs), and Jim Balsillie co-CEO of RIM walking down the hall so absorbed in reading email on his BlackBerry that he doesn’t hear me say good morning? Mainly that he has the good manners to have a member of staff walk with him so he doesn’t walk into anyone; I’ve never noticed anyone leaping out of my way to avoid getting trampled because you simply don’t notice when you’re that absorbed but I have taken some sudden swerves in railway stations to get out of the path of an oncoming commuter with their eyes fixed on their device so I assume it works both ways.
If your users carry BlackBerrys you can give them a little more to get absorbed in by rolling out the new BES 5. you’re going to want to; if the automatic failover for redundancy, manual failover for maintenance and 64-bit support don’t grab you, you’ll like the full Web-based remote admin (although it does need ActiveX in the browser). They’ll like email flags, being able to file messages and manage folders and - if you enable it - better access to fileshares behind your company firewall.
That’s all instant gratification of a sort, which appeals to the lizard brain. After the other CEO of RIM, Mike Laziridis, introduced BES 5 and celebrated ten years of BlackBerry (and 25 years of RIM) and Bob IBM of RIM showed off some very IBM-centric predictions about the evolution of enterprise collaboration based on smartphones and contextual information (which would have been visionary a year ago and now are just documenting established trends), ex-Disney Imagineer and US intelligence service CTO Eric Haseltine talked a lot about the lizard brain and how to take advantage of it to move your company in the right direction, because it isn’t going away any time soon.
Concept cars matter to the car industry because they show you a physical object you can imagine using rather than describing a service you can’t. The concrete, visual, tactile, tangible prototype appeals to the other big part of the brain, the visual and processing area. And given that in every enterprise the urgent trumps the important and most decisions are the emotional lizard brain arguing with the rational brain, you can do with getting more of the brain on your side.
At Disney Haseltine worked on the Park PDA; back in the 90s this was a handheld device that did everything from video conferencing to games. Of course the killer app wasn’t any of the big concept ideas; it was the text message that told you where in the park Mickey Mouse was so you could go get a photo of your kids with the rodent. Your smartphone can do a lot of that today, but Disney still does great business selling the Pal Mickey; a gadget that knows when you’re standing in line for a ride and likely to be bored, buzzes to offer your kids a secret message and uses a proximity sensor so that when they hold it up to their ear it can whisper at them about the ride they’re queuing for.
Haseltine’s point isn’t so much that your big idea is never go to match what users actually want but that the sooner you can give them something to try out, the sooner you’ll find out what they do want - and then you can use that to move a little further in your long-term direction, supported by users who are getting what they want as well. The people who will be most likely to take the time to try your prototype and give you useful reactions are not just the early adopters but the ones who are actually suffering in some way because they can’t do what they need; there’s always more incentive to get out of the discomfort zone.
And for support, don’t turn to executives or the formal development process; he suggested looking to the counterculture, the “underground informal rebel alliance who think the bureaucracy doesn’t get it”. Every company has them, and if you’re in IT you’ll probably have quite a few working with or for you. They’re going to be doing some unapproved skunkworks projects, so they might as well be something that suits your agenda.
His favourite recent example is the billions of dollars that the various US intelligence agencies spent on knowledge management and collaboration tools which had the same success as any other KM project; utter failure. (When we first watched Criminal Minds we assumed the show didn’t want to reveal the sophisticated IT the FBI must be using; I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that a technical analyst who could retrieve information from a variety of sources is something most FBI teams only dream of). Over at the CIA, a handful of agents got together and set up a completely unapproved and doubtless career-limiting copy of MediaWiki. Helped by the fact that a third of CIA officers are now what Haseltine calls “the Facebook and MySpace generation” (no figures on how many CIA agents are actually on Facebook), Intellipedia became something of a sleeper hit, delivering the knowledge sharing all the formal systems never managed.
Smartphones came into business the way that PDAs and PCs did; because users who thought they would be useful just started using them and demanding that IT support them; social networking and IM arrived the same way. The best way of getting some control over whatever comes next is to be involved in bringing it into business; your counterculture revolutionaries will be in the thick of that and if you can give them enough rope to drag your agenda along you could kill two birds with one stone.
-Mary
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AMD to the future
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Power, AMD, virtualisation, Processors, Futures, Enterprise, Hardware on
Last week saw the 6th birthday of AMD’s Opteron CPU, the core of its server product line. We were among a small group of journalists and analysts at AMD’s Sunnyvale campus for the event - which also included the launch of a new generation of silicon, and the unveiling of AMD’s Opteron roadmap for the next few years.
Pointing out that “the server market is very different”, AMD’s Nigel Dessau opened the even with a look at the way the server market has been changing over the last few years - with a move to throughput rather than clock speed with multicore systems, to virtualisation, and to designing for energy efficiency, all with the aim of changing the economics of the data centre. The result has been increaded server density and utilisation - more bang for your buck in less space!
So what happens next? Dessau suggests that “The way you assemble architectures is what makes the difference.” That’s why AMD puts so much into its CPUs, with much of what we’d normally consider to be the supporting chipset - including memory controllers - on the same silicon. It’s not quite a system on a chip, but it’s getting very close these days.
Pat Patla, the GM and VP of AMD’s Server Business Unit unveiled the new hardware. This was the roll out of the Istanbul product range, a six-core processor for existing two, four and eight socket systems with what he said was “30% more performance than the previous generation at the same power”. Istanbul also brings all of AMD’s power management technologies into one place as AMD-P.
Istanbul isn’t the end of the story - the next chapter is already being written in. AMD is already sampling its next generation processor, the 12-core “Magny-Cours”, which despite being a terrible pun, is a rather zippy piece of silicon - we watched a 48 core demo system much its way through several benchmarks. It’s not that far away, either, and should ship in 2010.
Virtualisation is a target market for the next generation of silicon, and it will add support for virtualised I/O. With I/O devices virtualised there’s a lot of scope for new application and new ways of working (as well as a chance to virtualise applications and servers that previously were locked into existing hardware). It’s all part of the Infrastructure 2.0 model, where management tools take advantage of hardware to deliver flexible self-managed virtualised data centres.
The other part of the AMD story is how it’s working on power management, with products available in different thermal bands - including a low power range intended for single and dual socket high density applications, ideal for cloud data centres. There’s a lot to be said for this approach, especially as all the features of the high end, high power CPUs are in the energy efficient versions. Dense deployments need greater efficiencies, as data centre costs are a huge proportion of the costs incurred in running a cloud service. With an average power of 40W, the EE series processors will help keep those cooling and power costs down.
Magny-Cours is only part of the AMD roadmap, and the company’s current architecture is a long term play (which is good for virtualisation, as it will allow asymmetric migrations, letting businesses use older hardware for disaster recovery purposes). The next generation will be 32nm devices in 2011, a 12 to 16 core device codenamed Interlagos and a 6 to 8 core device codenamed Valencia.
–Simon
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Hidden features
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Futures, Windows, Microsoft on
Too often little things hide away from you, little things that could simplify things or make things just that teensier bit easier. Take this one, for example:
As a followup to getting Windows 7 running on our media centre/TV, I was getting to grips with the various user account dialog boxes. I wanted to make a machine part of the domain I use here at our home office, but I really didn’t want the whole “CTRL-ALT-DEL” login screen experience. After all, I was already using fingerprint recognition to control access to my laptop - so I wasn’t at risk from fake login screens.
I was adding a couple of my standard users to the laptop in question, when I found something I didn’t recognise in the advanced tab of the User Accounts dialog. It was an option to suppress CTRL-ALT-DEL on login. “Huzzah!” I thought, “Something else good and new in Windows 7!” After all, there’s lots of UI tweaks in Windows 7, and something like this seemed to fit in with the new ethos at the heart of the OS.
But something nagged at me. The dialog box didn’t have the look of something added in Windows 7, and it was running outside the control panel window. I tracked down the same dialog box on a machine running Vista, and yes, the same option was there. Microsoft had put the option in long before I’d thought to look for it. Then it occurred to me - was the same option in XP?
As I don’t have any XP boxes around with the ability to join a domain (my biggest annoyance with XP Home running on a netbook), I had to resort to search engines (and O’Reilly’s Safari Online) to find that the function had been in Windows as far back as XP…
That’s one of the problems with Windows - in fact with pretty much all operating systems. They’ve grown over the years, building on an original set of UI ideas, on and on and on. The result is a set of user interface behaviours that inherit from old versions of the OS, and where dialog boxes don’t inherit the new ways of working. Bits of UI are buried under layers of new ways of working, and suddenly jar when you find them. The search-driven approach at the heart of the current generation of OSes changes the game, making these bits of old UI discoverable, and opening them up to all and sundry.
That’s a big problem for companies like Microsoft - there’s just so much code in Windows that it’s impossible for them to find and sanitise every window, every dialog. So what’s to be done? In the end, I suspect, nothing. It’s too expensive to find and fix them all. After all, these are dialogs that only the dedicated and most inquisitive will find - and for most of us, they’ll be settings pushed out by policies. So what matter if they look odd, or old? Even so, it’s something that needs to be cleaned up over time, slowly building a consistent user interface look-and-feel.
Of course, by the time we’ve fixed them all, it’ll be Windows 9 or 10 or OS X 8 or 9, and we’ll just have to start all over again.
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A quarter of new US PCs are 64-bit
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Vista, operating systems, Futures, Hardware, Windows, Microsoft on
When Bill Gates said that there were no more 32-bit operating systems in Microsoft’s future, he was only talking about server operating systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 will indeed only be 64-bit. Windows 7 will definitely come in 32-bit versions, but consumer PCs in the US are increasingly 64-bit according to Steven Sinofsky.
We asked the director of Microsoft’s hardware ecosystem, Gary Schare, to walk us through the numbers behind that claim. A quarter of all new US PCs connecting to Windows Update in October were running the 64-bit edition of Vista, up from 18% in September and just 1% in January.
This is driven by the falling price of memory and the number of PCs shipping with 4GB of RAM, which are increasingly supplied with 64-bit Vista in the US - Costco only sells 64-bit PCs now. That’s a trend he expects to continue with Windows 7. But as well as persuading hardware manufacturers to develop 64-bit drivers, Schare acknowledges there’s another hurdle: “we need to convince technology enthusiasts that their experience with 64-bit is not what you get when you buy a 64-bit PC from a retailer - it comes with all the drivers and everything works”.
–Mary
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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What do you want to do where today?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Beta, smartphone, operating systems, Web browser, Futures, Google, Windows, Hardware, Windows Mobile, Microsoft on
Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.
This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”.
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Should you worry about power costs
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Futures, Hardware on
Rising oil prices and financial uncertainty might not be the only reasons the electricity that runs your data centre could get more expensive. A cold winter might mean brownouts and blackouts, which means now is a good time to check your UPS capacity.
It took 21 gigawatts to send Marty Back to the Future. Britain generates 70-74gW on its own but with six out of ten nuclear power stations out of action and the usual ‘routine maintenance’ we’re down to about 57gW. That’s fine as long as the weather stays mild, but if we get an early cold snap demand could peak around 62gW. It’s more likely that the energy companies will just buy more electricity from France and put the price up to compensate than that we’ll see energy rationing or unexpected power cuts. Either way, you need to plan ahead.
Should you really worry? Owen Cole, the technical director at F5 Networks, thinks so. “There is currently debate around whether the UK faces a real electricity shortage in the near future. Given that there is credible, independent research to suggest there is a real threat, enterprises have no choice but to incorporate this scenario into their business continuity and disaster recovery planning
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